Commentary

Prayer is good, but reason and evidence are better

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I spotted a post over at the Anchoress about the issue of prayer and abortion. She is discussing with a friend whether to pray in front of an abortion clinic, which takes a lot of courage. But I don’t think that’s the only way to make a difference on abortion. I want to remind my readers that you can pray and debate. I think both are necessary. And debate is just as Biblical as prayer.

The Anchoress writes about the importance of prayer:

If you stand outside an abortion mill and peacefully pray for everyone inside, the abortionists and their aides, the troubled women choosing to enter, the babies – you are truly moving outside of your own concerns, your own ego, and growing in knowledge of generosity and detachment. Will you save a few lives? Perhaps, if God wills it.

But perhaps the point of your calling is two-fold; to affect the lives of others in a positive way, yes, but also to affect your own life, if you are open and trusting enough to allow yourself to be instructed and changed, as I know you will be.

I am convinced that the abortion issue itself is meant to be the long, protracted, painful, divisive and enduring struggle it is, because it is a challenge to the entire age.

The Torah says, “who saves a life saves the world entire.” Our common-wisdom will sometimes say – over new laws, or new restrictions or new requirements – “well, but if it saves a single life, it’s worth it.” We do know the value of human life, we know it instinctively and intrinsically, because our own DNA shouts out “I am good; I am important and I want to live” with every breath we take, every heartbeat pumped and every new blood cell created. But some of us work against that knowledge, for a variety of reasons. Some of it is self-loathing. Some of it is faux enlightenment. Some of it is simple, stubborn, adolescent contrariness, writ large.

I agree with all of this, but I want to also emphasize the importance of debating with our opponents.

I tend towards more confrontational means, and so I wanted to link together some of my best posts on defending the pro-life position, and then make some comments. When it comes to abortion, I’m inclined to keep faith, emotions and personal experiences right out of the discussion and stick with the strict philosophical reasoning and pure science.

First, let me share with you the links:

And now the comment. I think we need to get serious about the way we talk about social issues like abortion, marriage and divorce. Some Christians are hiding from these discussions and resorting to prayer alone because they believe that these are issues that are too emotional to debate. But emotions and personal experiences are irrelevant to questions of truth and morality.

The reason why society as a whole is sliding leftwards on social issues is because we wrongly believe that there is a fundamental split between facts and values. We believe in objective truth over here, as in chemistry and physics. And we believe in religious and moral truth over there, as in the existence of God and the sanctity of life. We need to halt the slide by treating the latter like the former.

And here’s how: learn to defend your views by reading books.

For example, is the abortion issue a concern to you? Then read Francis J. Beckwith’s 2007 book “Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice”, published by Cambridge University Press, and put it up on your shelf at work.

Is the marriage/divorce issue a concern to you? Then read Stephen Baskerville’s 2007 book “Taken into Custody: The War Against Fatherhood, Marriage, and the Family”, published by Cumberland House, and put it up on your shelf at work.

And so on… bioethics is just like any other area of publicly testable knowledge. The more you know, the more confident you become, and the easier it is to speak about these things in a non-threatening, academic tone. People actually debate these topics in formal, timed debates at universities, in front of students, for example.

We succeed in persuading our neighbors about social issues as we succeed in persuading our neighbors about anything. Bring more data to the table than your opponent and you will do well. Even if you don’t get an admission, talking about moral issues seriously creates respect for traditional social conservative views in the culture, by showing that we have reasons, and not just blind-faith.

UPDATE: This post over at Nice Deb is a must-read. Obama is telling Catholic Cardinals that he’s not pro-abortion.

6 thoughts on “Prayer is good, but reason and evidence are better”

  1. Pingback: Should I pray before an abortion clinic? | The Anchoress

  2. And then of course there is action – not doing business with companies that donate to groups that are involved in abortion, letting those companies know they have lost your business, helping a pregnant woman or single mother, teaching young people that abortion is never an option and that sex outside of marriage isn’t the good we imagine it to be. There are so many things we may be called to do; what we do at a particular moment isn’t really worth a great deal of our attention. What we must always do is accept the responsibility of living out our Catholic faith this moment, every moment and what we do will naturally vary according to circumstance and the gifts God gives us.

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    1. Great point! But don’t forget Protestants are working on this problem, too! I am one! My preferred contribution is to debate and to sponsor speakers who debate on college campuses, as well!

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  3. I’m pro-choice, as you perhaps might guess, but that simple label is incomplete when it comes to conveying my pposition on abortion. I don’t have any major ethical problems in aborting (“killing” if you prefer) a zygote, but I do have serious concerns with aborting a six-month old fetus. The ethical distinction here would be rooted in the neurological development of the fetus, its capacity to sense pain, etc. These are difficult issues to resolve medically, but I’d suggest a reasonable compromise is to limit abortion to an early stage of pregnancy, with exceptions to be made in cases where the health of the mother is determined to be in serious jeopardy.

    Medical professionals have offered a spectrum of views on when the fetus is able to sense pain. The general consensus seems to be the requisite neural wiring is in place and functioning by 24 weeks at the latest, but some believe that pain is sensed earlier. To complicate matters, there are different definitions of what it means to sense pain. For example, it may be that the thalamus can “feel pain” at 12 to 14 weeks, even though there is no connection to the cortex at that time. I’m really not sure what this means.

    http://www.religioustolerance.org/abo_pain2.htm

    I also think that memory is an important element as well, and if there is no lasting consequence of pain (physical or psychological, conscious or unconscious), then I’m not sure that the pain achieves the same ethical status as, say, the pain inflicted on torture victims.

    I listened to the Klusendorf presentation and I found it full of straw men and terminological sleight of hand. For example, it is quite reasonable, I claim, to associate ethical status with development, and indeed we do this all the time. Even though we all agree that it is “just as wrong” to murder a three year old girl as it is to murder a thirty year old woman, we certainly make ethical distinctions between the girl and the woman. For example, we generally do not find it morally troubling to subvert or frustrate the intentions of a child, while we would regard it as morally wrong to do so to another adult. Our excuse here is to say that the child is immature, which is quite true. If the three year old refuses to get in the car when her mother urgently needs to drop her off at day care and get to work (because, say, the child wants to sit and play), few among us would find it morally problematic if her mother were to firmly but safely pick up the child and forcibly place her in the car. Needless to say, it would be wrong to do the same to your elderly grandmother, who was making you late because she wanted to stay home and watch Matlock reruns.

    So ethical status certainly does change with levels of development. It might be argued that this is not the case with “right to life” issues, but I’d say that the correspondence between ethical status and development is highly nonlinear in this case. To sketch a solution, I’d say that once the fetus develops the capacity to sense and record pain, it acquires a right not to be molested or harmed.

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  4. WK, your last statement is one of those caricatures I don’t feel the need to address. Are you actually being serious with this objection?

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